Medical Intuition with Wendie Colter: Rational Wellness Podcast 99
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Wendie Colter discusses Medical Intuition with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
2:32 Medical Intuition is a skill set of being able to view the body and energy systems using visual intuition. While there are medical intuitives, this can also be used by physicians and healthcare practitioners in helping to support a diagnosis by adding the information derived to the history and test results to help the patient to find the correct path to healing.
5:50 One of the advantages of medical intuitives is that they can help in difficult cases where there is no clear diagnosis based on the test results and history.
8:16 When a doctor or practitioner is choosing which type of treatment or recommendation, intuition can play a helpful role. Wendie said that sometimes those practitioners who use and trust their intuition are often the doctors who are the most successful and sought after.
14:37 From a physician’s perspective, this intuition can be developed with the proper training. Wendy’s Practical Path program that teaches medical intuition helps healthcare providers to be able to better use their intuition and to learn a protocol of asking and receiving instructions from the body using the “meta sense” of visualization. This means seeing things through your mind’s eye–using your visual sense to see into the body and discern information about it. Wendy notes that she developed her medical intuition over time and does not feel she was born with it.
Wendie Colter is a Medical Intuitive and she has effectively taught doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, energy workers and health professionals of every kind, how to use medical intuition in their practices. She founded The Practical Path in 2009 to present her unique programs in intuitive development for health and wellness, including the Medical Intuitive Training, which offers certification and accreditation for continuing education.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111 or go to www.drweitz.com.
Podcast Transcripts
Dr. Weitz: This is Dr. Ben Weitz with the Rational Wellness podcast, bringing you the cutting edge information on health and nutrition from the latest scientific research, and by interviewing the top experts in the field. Please subscribe to the Rational Wellness podcast on iTunes and YouTube, and sign up for my free ebook on my website by going to drweitz.com. Let’s get started on your road to better health. Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Thank you so much for joining me again today, and for those who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness podcast, please go to iTunes and give us a ratings and review. That way, more people will find out about the Rational Wellness podcast.
Our topic for today is medical intuition, with Wendie Colter. Medical intuitives often feel like they can see inside of the body and detect physical problems without physically examining the purpose or looking at any test results. Intuitives often link illnesses to any individual’s thoughts, emotions, and past traumatic experiences, but such intuition can also be included within an evidence-based doctor’s approach to treating patients, though many physicians are reluctant to talk about or accept such ideas.
Wendie Colter is a professional medical intuitive for 20 years, and she’s one of the very few medical intuitive trainers in the United States. Based in Los Angeles, Wendie founded The Practical Path in 2009 to help her present her educational programs in intuitive training, and she has effectively taught doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, energy workers and health professionals of every kind how to use medical intuition in their practices. Wendie, thank you so much for joining me today.
Wendie Colter: Thank you, Ben. A real privilege to be here.
Dr. Weitz: And I want to say to all my listeners that this is a little bit outside of my normal wheelhouse. Definitely more right brain, more … I tend to be very analytical and scientific-based in my thinking. So Wendie, can you start by explaining, what is medical intuition?
Wendie Colter: Absolutely. Medical intuition is a skill, that’s a skill set of being able to view the body and the energy systems using visual intuition. And that’s a very specific kind of intuition, and it’s an interesting thing to teach, and it’s an interesting thing to talk about, because it is very right brain, but it’s also a wonderful melding of left brain knowledge and right brain intuitive ability.
Dr. Weitz: What are some of the benefits from medical intuition?
Wendie Colter: Well, the certified graduate students of the program, who are from a broad variety of areas in healthcare, from physicians to nurses to complementary alternative and integrative, and mental healthcare too, they all use it in different ways. But what they’re doing is getting deeper information on the issues that their clients or patients have, so that they can help them find the correct paths to healing for them. So, for someone like you, and perhaps an MD, it might be a support for diagnosis. And we’re finding that a good deal of the physicians are using it in case review time when they really have time to take a look at what’s going on for there patient, and they’re finding … and I’ll talk a little bit about the survey that we’ve done and the study that’s coming up through USCD School of Medicine, where we’re finding these very, very, high accuracy rates in terms of what they’re discerning from the body’s energy bio field, and the information that they’re getting or receiving through this process.
Dr. Weitz: So, is medical intuition essentially a form of energy healing, or is it, you know …
Wendie Colter: It’s actually not. People tend to put this sort of thing in with other forms of energy or biofield work like reiki or healing touch or things along those lines, but it’s actually not that. It’s a foundational skill that can be used in any healthcare protocol, or any healthcare perspective. And that’s, again, why we get this very broad scope of practitioners in the program, because it gives you some wonderful abilities … “Abilities” is a funny word, but wonderful skills in being able to receive information that you wouldn’t necessarily have gotten from a blood test or an examination, that has to do with the underlying causes and reasons for the imbalance. And that’s a perspective that’s just starting to get into the medical world, that your emotions actually have something to do with your physical body, and your life experience and your life history actually will make a difference in terms of what kind of issues you’re experiencing. And that’s really the cornerstone of medical intuition, is that that is the case. We see that. We understand that. And that’s not new to medicine at all, right?
Dr. Weitz: So now, medical intuitives, I mean, one of the advantages … Is one of the main advantages for cases that are difficult to solve or understand, where maybe the tests aren’t clear? Is that one way to think about this?
Wendie Colter: Oh, definitely. And just for that reason alone, that’s a huge, huge value to medical intuition, right off the bat. And I have many case studies and whatnot, case reports from my own career as a medical intuitive, from my own work, and from my students. In fact, one of the things we’re doing right now is surveys with a cohort of patients at UCSD, who call themselves Project Apollo. Wonderful people, about 30 to 40 patients, who put together this group because they are the hard-to-diagnose people. They’ve got difficult issues that span a range of potential causes, and that group and my certified graduates, we’re doing surveys with them and finding just a ridiculously high, in the upper 90% accuracy rate in terms of the medical intuitives being able to see where in the body and what’s going on, where the imbalances are, where the blockages are, where the history is for these wonderful people to find paths to healing. And as a medical intuitive, you might imagine I get all the tough cases, right? People who haven’t had a satisfactory diagnosis. People who feel like they’ve been ping-ponged around the medical world, and not really had anything definitive come through. And so, you asked if it was a healing modality. Healing happens, and if you think about mind-body-spirit, or mental-emotional-physical and all the rest of it, that is absolutely part of it. However, what I do as a medical intuitive is see where healing can occur. There are just not biases about it, in other words. It may absolutely be the surgery, the drug. It might be complementary alternative, but I have sort of a broad job in terms of what I need to do when I look at someone’s energy. I think I went off the track with your question, I’m sorry.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, okay. No, that’s okay. So, to understand how maybe it fits into my practice or somebody like me, so I’m thinking that when I’m treating a patient, after I’ve done a diagnosis, done some physical exam, taken their history, on the chiropractic end, I have certain protocols. But then, there’s always some selection involved in, “How exactly am I going to treat this patient? What’s sorts of adjustments am I going to use?” Part of it’s just indicated by what I feel, but there’s also a choice. I realize that there’s some intuition in that this person’s gonna be respond to this type of therapy or to this type of adjustment, and on the Functional Medicine end, I may do a lab test and find out they have an imbalance in their gut with an overgrowth of certain bacteria or a parasite. But then there’s a choice of different possible therapies, and a lot of times it’ll be a choice of different supplements, and I think there’s some intuition there in how I’m thinking each person’s going to respond without actually consciously saying I’m tapping into my intuition, right?
Wendie Colter: Well, yes. And most people in the medical world don’t even like that word. But here’s the thing. What patients know, and certainly what other doctors know and people in healthcare know, is that those particular practitioners who are using their intuition and trusting it, those are the ones everybody recommends. “You’ve gotta go see my chiropractor. He’s amazing. He just knows.” You know? That kind of thing. And that’s really valid. I mean, that’s really the bottom line in terms of why anyone would want to learn how to develop that, because that’s what we’re talking about. Now, I don’t diagnose. I’m not licensed to diagnose, although many of my students are. And some are not. So we don’t ever diagnose. We will assess and evaluate, and we’ll tell our client to go take this to their primary care physician. And that’s really part of the ethical stance. Now, I know that wasn’t quite your question, but that’s about scope of practice, and so from your scope of practice, you would be able to use medical intuition to narrow down that focus on what the best treatment is. And that is huge. I mean, that’s really huge. People can spend a lot of money and time following a line that’s not gonna work for them or doesn’t work for them. It’s just frustrating for everybody.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Wendie Colter: So in order to get people to the correct protocols quickly, medical intuition is pretty right on. We’ve found, in our surveying, in our testing, that it’s pretty accurate in that respect.
Dr. Weitz: I also think, with diagnosis, even though I’m not using some intuitive sense in the beginning to sort of figure out, “Hey, you have a herniated disc” or, “You have SIBO.” A lot of times patients present with a complex set of issues, so on the musculoskeletal end, they’ll have pain in their hip. They’ll have pain in their back. There’s some indication that it’s a hip problem. It’s a back problem. And so, there’s layers of doing … Even though I use all the scientific procedures and the orthopedic tests and X-rays and MRI and all these other things, there’s still layers of different problems, and so I think that there’s probably still some intuition as to, “Am I gonna focus on the hip first and try to clear that out, instead of the back?”
And on the Functional Medicine end, I often get patients with complex sets of problems and maybe they’ll have some bacterial overgrowth that’ll come up on a stool test or a parasite, and then maybe they’ll also have some mold and they’ll have some mercury toxicity or a nutritional deficiency. And I have found that it’s not efficient to try to treat all those things at one time, and so there’s a certain amount of choice what to prioritize, and let’s focus on this. And there’s probably some intuition going into that too, right?
Wendie Colter: Without question. And this is one of the gifts and the challenges of Functional Medicine, isn’t it?
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Wendie Colter: You know so much more. You know that those other things that you looked at, the nutrition and how the gut microbiome is and you name it, affects the musculoskeletal. All the bones are connected to all the other bones, so to speak. So this is where medical intuition is really, really helpful to look at the full picture, which is what a medical intuitive will get right off the bat. It’s one of the first things I teach, is how to get a good view of everything that’s going on in the physical body from every system perspective, where it takes … It’s a very short process, but we can see where the highlights are, so to speak, in the full physical body. And from there, we can start delving into various areas, and see what’s going to help get the balance right.
So here’s the premise, then. It’s that the body actually has all of this information for you, which it does. And in Western medicine and traditional medicine, we have all these tests to try to discern it, and we figure out what the priority is, et cetera, as you just so beautifully said. A medical intuitive sees a similar picture, but from a different perspective. We’re asking the body to show us, “What’s the priority? What’s going on where, and what needs to be dealt with sooner than later in the priority line?” And then, “How? What’s the best way to treat that? What does the body want to heal?” So from the physician perspective, the practitioner perspective, that intuition you’re talking about can actually be developed by using this method to say, “Okay, we’re gonna go in this line.”
Dr. Weitz: And this is something that we can get better at by training?
Wendie Colter: Gosh, yes. Yeah. So the point is, is that most people use their intuition like this. They kinda get a hit or they sorta go, “Hm,” and they kinda feel through it. And that’s a wonderful way to use intuition. That’s the way most healthcare providers do, if they choose to call it that. In my program, this method gets you from A to Z by following a very specific protocol of asking and receiving answers through an intuitive process, and that process gives you a set of instructions from the body. The body is basically speaking, in a manner of speaking, to the medical intuitive practitioner. And there’s a lot of question/answer that goes on, question-asking. “Well, is it this? Is it this? Let’s look.” And when I say “look,” I’m talking about an intuitive visual process that has to do with using intuitive sight. And this is where we’re going to get a little woo woo here.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, so as a medical intuitive, you’re helping to come up with … I don’t know if you call it a diagnosis, but essentially a diagnosis without touching the person, without doing any testing?
Wendie Colter: Yes.
Dr. Weitz: So explain how that works.
Wendie Colter: Okay. So how that works is through what I call a meta sense, meaning beyond your typical senses of our five senses. Meta sense is sort of an expanded version of those, and in my work, I use the meta sense of visualization. In other words, seeing in the mind’s eye, which our culture understands that. If we visualize, visualization skills. We see that a lot in mindfulness training, in all kinds of meditation, where we’re asked to visualize or do guided imagery, things like that. It’s a similar skill, but what we’re doing is, we’re using our visual sense to see into the body. Now, that’s a leap for many people, but actually, when they start to learn how to do it, it’s a very natural skill. Which is what’s so unusual and so wonderful to me about teaching intuition, is when people start to work that muscle, so to speak, of their visual intuition, it actually is not that difficult to do once they get the hang of it.
So within a very short period of time, people are able to discern information in the physical body, and I’ll tell you how it looks to me. And hang with me here, because I know it’s going to sound a little unusual. It looks to me like looking at a functional MRI, so if I look at your physical body in the medical intuitive state, I’m literally seeing how the organs are working, how the body is functioning, what the systems are doing, and where the imbalances are. And that’s something you can train. And I know that sounds as farfetched as anything that we take as … These days, seems normal to us, that 20-50 years ago sounded like, “Whoa, what are you talking about?” But it actually works, and our studies and our surveys have shown that it does, so there you go.
Dr. Weitz: Are you familiar with muscle testing?
Wendie Colter: Yes. No, I think kinesiology is a wonderful thing, and it’s not dissimilar, in that the body has a knowledge and that’s the premise of kinesiology, right? More or less?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Yeah, so I’ll just preface it by saying this. When I first got into chiropractic, and I saw people doing muscle testing, I said, “Come on. Get out of here. What kind of nonsense is this?” And then people said, “Well, you know, you could even test somebody without even being there and then you can …” “Come on, there’s no scientific basis for this.” And to this day, I still have a tough time with it, but a lot of practitioners use it, and I’ve experimented a little bit, and I’m thinking that really what they’re tapping into is, is medical intuition of the body, don’t you think?
Wendie Colter: Well, yes and no. The premise of kinesiology is wonderful, and that is that the body has a knowledge. And so you can do these techniques with muscle testing, and the body can give you a yes or a no and that sort of thing. And it’s terrific, and I love that it’s kind of permeated certainly into chiropractic and things like that. Medical intuition is actually more finely-tuned, and a lot of kinesiologists are gonna be not thrilled with me saying that, but we’ve found that the testing is more … When we’ve tested kinesiology against medical intuition, we’ve found more accuracy rates, in terms of finely tuning, in medical intuition. Because the premise is the same. The technique is different.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Wendie Colter: Yeah. But it is along the same lines of, “What are we talking about here? We’re saying that the body knows, so how do we find out what the body knows?”
Dr. Weitz: Are you just born with this medical intuitive capability?
Wendie Colter: No. I actually developed it over time. I wouldn’t say I was born with it.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so this is a skill that other people, anyone could develop or only … Okay.
Wendie Colter: I’ve taught a lot of skeptics, Ben.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Wendie Colter: You really have to be skeptical, particularly in the world of healthcare. We’re dealing with people’s most potent issues, and yeah. It’s good to be skeptical. So, yes. You don’t have to be born with it, and you can learn. You know, I equate it to learning a language. If you wanted to learn Italian or some language, you wouldn’t think, “Oh, I can just do this.” You would go to school or you would take a course or you would do something to learn things you don’t know. Even though, once you get facility with a language, it feels like maybe you could have done it all along, I don’t know, on your own.
Dr. Weitz: Give me an idea of how I could start to develop medical intuition. I mean, I’m not asking you to give us your whole course, but just give us an idea of what sort of training would mean.
Wendie Colter: Well, the program is two levels, level one and level two. I’ll kinda give you an outline and then I’ll give you some info on it. The first level is getting to understand and use the visual intuitive skill. So we’re taking a look at the physical body and all the body systems. We’re looking at the energy systems as well, the chakra system, that auric field, the biofield. And we’re getting comfortable with the idea and the practice of really looking at something with visual intuition and getting feedback on what we’re seeing. So right off the bat, in the very first module of that four-module program of level one, people are using that skill.
Level two is a five-month program, and that is about really mastering this practice from all perspectives, so we’re looking at everything, Ben. We’re looking at the physical body, the DNA, anything you can do a test with and things you can’t do a test with, we’re looking at. But we’re also looking for the underlying root causes of these issues, and that’s really where medical intuition shines, and can really shine for people. Because what does your patient want to know? I mean, if there’s a trauma, a physical trauma, and from your perspective perhaps as a chiropractor and there’s some musculoskeletal issue, that is obvious.
But what if there’s something that comes from a deeper root? For example, the gut microbiome. Where’s that connection emotionally, mentally, right? Not just physically. So medicine generally works on just the physical stuff. Patch people up, get them right, get them healed. Get them out the door, all that. But medical intuition takes a broader view, and that is, “What circumstances in life led to this imbalance?” Because that’s where a lot of the healing can happen, in that area. Now the psychologists, you can imagine, love this because it supports that perspective too. But this is all informational for the patient or client. We’re noticing that kind of information that comes through that’s held in the body or the energy systems is extremely valuable for people in understanding what the trajectory of their health is, and how to move forward.
Dr. Weitz: Can you share any examples or cases that you’ve been involved with, where you were able to help a client?
Wendie Colter: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a million of them. The one I like to talk about, because it has sort of the whole picture of the emotional with the physical, is a client of mine, a woman in her mid-40s, successful businesswoman. She wanted me to take a look at her wrist, because she had a very persistent case of tendonitis. And you know, tendonitis can take a long time to clear up, but she wanted me to look at it. She’d had it for about a month, and she’d been the doctor’s and she was wearing the bandage and she’d been icing and nothing was working. It was just as bad when she saw me as it was when she first flared up. She wasn’t someone who had tendonitis a lot. It was something that came up out of the blue, and so when I took a look at it with medical intuition, my job is to look at it from two perspectives. One is the physical perspective, what’s happening physically. And the other is what’s happening emotionally, mentally, et cetera. So the first thing her wrist wanted me to see was those inflamed tendons. Remember, I said I kinda see an fMRI visual. So I saw those tendons. They looked pretty inflamed, but underneath the tendons, I saw a healed bone scar in the wrist bones. So there was something else going there, her body wanted to show me.
Dr. Weitz: Now, did you actually see that? Or you saw it through your mind’s eye? In other words, was it visual? Could you actually look at her arm and see that?
Wendie Colter: I wasn’t looking at her arm. I was looking at using my visual intuition in the mind’s eye.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so it didn’t matter if she was covered up with a long sleeve or anything else.
Wendie Colter: Didn’t matter.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Wendie Colter: That’s the nice thing, because the skill is, you can use it remotely or in person. So it’s really pretty wonderful that way. There’s no real limitation in that respect. So what I saw was the workings of the wrist, and there was this bone scar, and I also saw, it looked like a bit of a cloud around her wrist, and it was an emotional energy of grief and heartbreak. Now, I didn’t know about her life. I didn’t know any of the circumstances of her life, and that’s another key point, is that I look at people’s energy that I’ve never met before. So what I saw was a little scene from her life.
So the first part’s the physical. The second part of how we use our mind’s eye visualization is, we’re looking at circumstances, life experience, and the body holds that too. And again, that’s not unusual to medicine. Anyone who’s worked with muscle groups and things like that, very often emotion is held in the body in those ways. So there’s life experience that goes with that. So what I did see was about … She was in her early 20s, so her body showed me a little scene from her life, and I saw that she was playing tennis with her boyfriend. She tripped and fell and broke that wrist, and that’s what that bone scar was from. That bone healed bone. And the body wanted to show me this because the next thing it showed me was her in the ER after she broke her wrist, getting her wrist taped up, and her boyfriend breaking up with her in the hospital room there.
So her wrist was holding onto this experience, not only of physical trauma, but emotional trauma. And that was what was causing the flare-up of the tendons in her wrist today, now. Now, what was interesting about this is that at that moment, my client said that she was going through an emotional breakup with her partner, who she’d been with for 10 years. And when she gave it just a moment’s of thought, she said, “Well, you know what? We broke up about a month ago just before this flared up.” And that’s a very common experience, and it may sound farfetched, but to the body, it’s actually quite rational. So her body was holding onto this experience in her wrist, and this breakup in the present activated all of that unhealed emotional trauma from that time. Now, what’s interesting about this particular case is that there was more. The wrist had more to show me, and when I asked again, “Is there anything else?” It showed me an image of her around five years old, and she was in a dark closet and she was holding her wrist up like this, and there was a cane coming down and striking it, right in that same spot. And my client, at that point, said, “My mother was mentally ill. She used to beat me with her cane and lock me in a closet.”
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Wendie Colter: That’s pretty dramatic. Intense. But here’s the thing. I had no conscious awareness of that, but her body had been holding on, her wrist, right in that spot, had been holding onto all of this grief and emotion from her life history, and it doesn’t take much to trigger that, and that’s what happened for her. Now the good news is, part of my job is also to ask, “Well, what does this body part, what does this issue need to heal?” On all levels: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. And for her, her wrist said, “It’s really not about the physical in this case. It’s really about the emotional and so she just needs to process the emotions and maybe a little more ice and rest would be good.” You know, that kind of thing. And I gave her a call a couple of days later to see how she was, and she told me the pain was gone. It left within 48 hours.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Wendie Colter: Yeah. And she felt more able to process the emotions of this intense breakup. So it’s not an unusual story. Put it that way. It’s not an unusual case that the body hangs onto things from early life experience, kind of re-experiences it when there are triggers.
Dr. Weitz: Now, I’m sure some out there are gonna be sitting there thinking, “Whoa. Somebody just goes to see a medical intuitive, and they tell them … give them some diagnosis. They may be really missing out on some life-threatening disease that wasn’t diagnosed because they didn’t get the proper examination and testing from a medical professional.”
Wendie Colter: Well, you’re talking about ethics here. And the way I use medical intuition, the way I train people in medical intuition, is that everything needs to be backed up. Everything has to have … I will not take a client who’s not willing to see a medical provider. This is a support system, medical intuition, is to give the client or patient information that will help them in their healing journey. And for someone like you, who is a functional medicine practitioner, that information’s gonna help you in how you work with the patient. For me, from my ethical perspective and scope of practice, my client absolutely has to take all of this information to their primary care physician, and to be totally honest, what I’m working towards is the day when a medical intuition becomes someone you would call on, or someone a physician would call on, as part of the care team. Because that’s really the job. That’s really the best placement for medical intuition.
Dr. Weitz: And would it be best for somebody to see a medical intuitive after they’ve seen a conventional or a functional practitioner who’s come up with a diagnosis, and then you step in either as an adjunct or in cases where they can’t figure out what’s going on? Or is it reasonable for you to see them first, and then maybe the medical or functional or other practitioner take into account your insights in figuring out what the diagnosis is?
Wendie Colter: All of that. Any version of that is fine. I mean, it really is up to … Well, let me put it this way. There are some pretty visionary doctors out there who are calling on medical intuitives to assist them in that perspective. There’s a medical intuitive who works in the ER. She’s a volunteer at UCSD. She works with one doctor who’s brought her in. Now, these are ER cases. That’s very immediate. And I don’t know what their history is in terms of outcomes, but she’s been working here for over 10 years.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Wendie Colter: So there’s definitely a value there, and that’s really where I see medical intuition helping, because it’s a support skill that can really help. If you don’t mind, I can give you another case report that outlines this.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, that’d be great.
Wendie Colter: So, this particular case report, this was a client I had about 15 or so years ago, and this one really changed the idea of medical intuition for me personally, from this really cool thing that you can do, it’s kinda neat and really interesting, you know, there’s all kinds of groovy information, to something that looked like, “This is very, very critical in healthcare.” So it kind of flipped the switch for me in that regard, and that’s why I started thinking, “I need to train people. I need to teach people this.” So as a young woman in her 20s, an actress … I’m in Los Angeles, so we get a lot of entertainment people here. Lovely, waif-like young girl, who had pretty severe kidney pain. It was in that part of the back of the body, and she’d been to specialists. It had been going on for quite a while. She was really affected by it, and all of the tests came back negative. They couldn’t find anything. They didn’t know why she was in such pain. And so, she was prescribed antidepressants because she was not super functional at that moment with all that, and also opioids. They didn’t really have anything else for her, and when I looked at her kidneys area, I actually saw what it was, and it was a crystallization. A little kidney stone that was too small for the tests at the time. The testing might be better now, I don’t know, or more refined. But it was under two millimeters or whatever it was. It was tiny. But it had come out, just out of the kidney, and into the ureter tube, and kind of lodged there, and it wasn’t budging. And it was causing her physical pain.
So what I did was, I asked her kidney system, her urinary system, “Can this just flush out? Will it leave on its own? What needs to happen here?” And what her kidney said to me was, “This needs a surgical intervention.” Those were the words that her kidney said, right? And so, what I did was I said, “Look. I’m seeing this. It really looks like you need the right physician to help you with. Perhaps a surgeon who’s willing to take a look.” And I drew her a little picture of her kidney and the ureter tube. I said, “Right here.” And she took it, and that was it, and I didn’t find out what happened for her until about, at least a couple of years later. She actually found somebody who was willing to do a little more exploratory work. She’d had a surgery. It was successful, and the pain was gone and then she was able to get on with her life. And what was interesting about this story and actually tragic is that she got addicted to the opioids, which was something that happens. And when she wasn’t able to get the pain medication anymore, she turned to heroin, and she died of an overdose.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Wendie Colter: Yeah. And that was a real wake-up call for me. I went, “Oh my goodness. This should have never happened.”
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Wendie Colter: And I think about, if her doctors had had a medical intuitive to ask, to call on, or were trained in medical intuition themselves, those tests that were inconclusive, where the patient was still showing these symptoms, they could have looked, and in my opinion, she would still be alive. One would hope. Now, that’s a dramatic story and a tragic one, but it does outline the use and the usefulness, and kind of the critical usefulness for many, many patients and clients, of the need for this kind of look, rather than going through the traditional … When your client is asymptomatic, or … Not asymptomatic. Atypical symptom-
Dr. Weitz: Right. You know, when we were studying diagnosis, something came up that you would see in some of the textbooks was “etiology unknown,” and at time was the most common diagnosis. And so, there’s far too many conditions where patients present with symptoms. They have dizziness. They have brain fog. They have some abdominal discomfort, and nobody can find anything. And so then they give them opioids or they give them prednisone, or they give them something to sort of cover up the symptoms. And that’s, of course, as a functional practitioner, that’s one of the things we pride ourselves on, is trying to dig deeper and find some of those underlying causes. But I see that your role can be equally beneficial in trying to find some of those causes that aren’t readily apparent from their traditional methods of diagnosis and examination and history-taking.
Wendie Colter: Absolutely, and I will tell you that … Oh, there’s a point I wanted to make here that I thought was so perfect, and it just went right out of my head.
Dr. Weitz: Probably my long, winding-
Wendie Colter: No, no, no. It’s perfect. Yeah. No, no, you’re absolutely right. And again, we’re finding in our surveys that the medical intuitives … Well, so one of the questions on our survey is, “Did the medical intuitive match the diagnosis you got from your doctor?” Which is a really interesting question for that very reason.
Dr. Weitz: Now, what in terms of studies are there, to give some … I don’t wanna say “credibility,” but I guess credibility, to medical intuitives?
Wendie Colter: Well, we need that credibility because this has been a skill that’s been practiced for decades, maybe hundreds of years, with no accurate testing. So last year, we started a survey process with the certified graduates of my program, to test their accuracy level. And we found 94 to 99% accuracy amongst these questions we’re asking, “Did the medical intuitive locate the part of your body, the issue that you were having, accurately? If you received a diagnosis, does it match the diagnosis?” Which is an interesting question for the very thing you said, because sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, because the diagnosis may or may not be accurate. I know what I was gonna say. I was gonna say that working in intuition and medical intuition for 20 years, I’ve seen issues in people’s physical systems, there is no name for yet, and years later, there will be articles upon articles. For example, SIBO. Big question about SIBO, small intestinal bowel overgrowth.
Dr. Weitz: Talk about it all the time.
Wendie Colter: All the time. I was seeing bacterial overgrowth in intestines 15-20 years ago, with no name for it. So this is not uncommon in the world of medical intuition. It’s interesting, when things catch up.
Dr. Weitz: Very interesting.
Wendie Colter: You know, it becomes tricky because at the time, what were the treatments? Now there are more specific treatments. And I’m gonna segue for a second and get back to what I was saying before. One of the famous medical intuitives in the United States in years past was a gentleman named Edgar Cayce. He had a clinic in the 1920s in the south, and he would go into some kind of little trance, and he would be extremely accurate with his medical intuition, and he had doctors verifying it and corroborating. And when he opened his clinic … You’ll find this fascinating. It dealt mostly with the gut microbiome. He didn’t call it that. He called it the digestive system. And working with people in terms of food and stress, things like that, to help the gut microbiome, in the 1920s. I mean, this gentleman was way ahead of his time.
Dr. Weitz: Yes, definitely.
Wendie Colter: That’s what he was discerning from medical intuition, as you said, medical intuition. Which, it wasn’t called that at the time. Okay, I completely lost my track. What was your question?
Dr. Weitz: That’s okay. So, what are some of the hospitals or medical centers that you teach or have taught at?
Wendie Colter: Yeah. So I’ve been very lucky and blessed, and I’ve been brought in by physicians who are quite visionary in this area, who see the value of the work, and I’m teaching now at Scripps Health in San Diego at the Prebys Cardiovascular Institute Center. They brought me in, I teach there once a year. And I also teach live online, so I teach people all over the country, and now all over the world. I also have been very … It’s a wonderful experience teaching at the integrative medicine elective rotation at Dr. Andrew Weil’s Center for Integrative Medicine in Arizona, and hopefully I’ll be able to go back there. And that’s wonderful, because I’m teaching fourth-year medical students and residents, and they’re just … It’s a phenomenal experience, just to speak with a roomful of MDs, you know? Because their perspective is right on, and people who have been trained as yourself in such a deep way about the physical body and the systems, to look at it from the perspective of intuitive visual or energetic frequency and all that jazz, is really fascinating. So it’s lovely to see that, and I do see that functional medicine in particular, and integrative, have really changed the game in medicine, even from five years ago, Ben. You know, talking to rooms full of physicians and whatnot is just a joy to me, because people kinda get this. You kinda go, “Oh yeah, you know? I had that feeling once.” And the question is, can you think about it as something you can actually develop as a skill? The answer is yes, but many people just haven’t even thought about it that way.
Dr. Weitz: So, how can we find out about your programs, your training programs?
Wendie Colter: ThePracticalPath.com is my website. And I teach the program, level one, twice a year, and level two twice a year. So it’s about a nine-month sequence, and there’s a lot of case reporting and things like that, and whatnot. So you can find it on the website, the practicalpath.com. And you had asked me one other question, if you don’t mind me going backwards, about the surveys. Yeah, I was telling you about the surveys we’ve been doing. The surveys and the outcomes of the data on the surveys is also on the website, under the tab “about,” there’s a little page called, “What is medical intuition?” And I’ve posted the outcomes of the surveys, which have been just phenomenal in terms of what we’ve been seeing.
That data has led us to a wonderful … The Center for Integrative Medicine at UCSD, and the people there have wanted to partner with us. So I’ve partnered with a wonderful doctor by the name of Paul Mills, who together we’re collaborating on a full-fledged study through UCSD School of Medicine, the first study of its kind that I’m aware of, on medical intuition. There have been studies in the past, small studies and single medical intuitives or whatnot. We’re gonna do a broad scope, full-fledged study. So we’re in the process of raising funds for that. If anybody listening is interested, let me know. Go to the website, because we really wanna get this off the ground. It’s just a very groundbreaking kind of a skill. And the study will be really …
Dr. Weitz: Good. Yeah, good luck with that. We definitely need more information to help our patients, and sounds like medical intuition is something that’s just starting to come into its own as an adjunct form of diagnosis, care, et cetera.
Wendie Colter: Yeah, and evaluation assessment. A lot of the nurses that take the program use this in their practices. They can’t legally diagnose either, so what they’re doing is they’re bringing that information to their doctors. Whether the doctors listen to them, I don’t know, but that’s what they do, and that’s really part of their job. And what’s interesting about the nursing profession is that nurses are told to use their gut instinct, aren’t they? They’re told to-
Dr. Weitz: Are they really? Yeah.
Wendie Colter: Yes. They’re told to just use their hunch or their gut instinct. That’s another way to say intuition. And if they just kind of discern or feel or get or feel that something’s not right, they need to say something. So those nurses who have studied and practiced medical intuition can not only say that, “Something’s wrong here, but here’s what I’m discerning that looks like it could be needs some looking into.”
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. Excellent. So, thanks for bringing some intuition to us today.
Wendie Colter: To your rational podcast here.
Dr. Weitz: Exactly. Okay.
Wendie Colter: Yeah. It’s quite rational when you figure out and you learn how to use it.
Dr. Weitz: And I’ll put links in the show notes for listeners and viewers who wanna contact you afterwards, so check out your intuitive learning programs. Thank you,
Wendie Colter: Oh, thank you so much.
